Titano

29 years ago - Titano is born in captivity, reared by the army as a test animal. He is befriended by a young Lois Lane.

17 years ago - 12-year-old Titano reaches maturity and is moved to the Metropolis Zoo.

7 years ago - 22-year-old Titano is used by Gorilla Grodd to attack Superman. He is mutated by kryptonite-infused nanites, causing him to grow exponentially. Lois Lane calms him. Star Labs is able to remove his nanite infusion, but he retains his huge size. Superman moies him to his own island.

DC loves apes. Loves them. There is literally no explanation for this, but it is also totally undeniable. Not just because of the endless list of ape-themed characters. There are plenty of times across all of DC's continuity when characters have been turned into apes for one reason or another. I've had long conversations about why this is the case, but we'll never really know. All we know is that there are a lot of them, and it falls to us to try to make sense of them all.

Titano is actually one of the easier ape characters to make sense of, because he's not meant to be malicious or villanious. He's an animal... He's just an animal that has grown gigantic and has lazer eyes... and those are easy to explain, since these are comics.

Titano's Comic History

Titano first appeared in 1959, very nearly the height of the utter lunacy that populated comics of the era. He wasn't that complicated a concept; he was a chimp that had been sent into orbit as part of the space program. It's worth pointing out, this was right during the time when many countries were pretty regularly launching monkeys into space, and we were still completely in the dark as to just what this might do, so the idea that one of these space monkeys might be bombarded with weird radiation and grow into a city-smashing monster wasn't THAT outlandish.

Of course, there isn't a lot you can do with Titano's story beyond just have him show up an smash things. The character would come back every so often, but once the Crisis of Infinite Earths happened they started redesigning the wheel each time he came back, with some new storytelling quirk creating the circumstances that made a chimpanzee grow to a giant kryptonite-powered colossus.

More recent versions of the character have actually branched out even further. He's appeared twice in the New 52; once as an albino ape that actually was only about 12-15 feet tall, and then again as an actual gigantic gorilla automaton with green lights in his interior. It seems like an effort to keep Titano in Superman's mythology is making them complicate what should be a very simply character.

Our Titano Story

The single best version of Titano, in my opinion, is what appeared in the Superman animated series. he was a simple chimp that was the victim of some strange science that was making him grow. What made him really work was that they gave him a history, long before he was ever introduced to any weird science, with Lois Lane. It makes sense; we all know that Lois is an army brat who was raised on military bases. The idea that she might form a bond with a military test subject feels totally believable.

​Meanwhile, there's the small matter of just what the hell is going on here... why is harmless little Titano growing to King Kong proportions? We actually decided to lean into the fact that DC has so many ape characters and use it to our advantage; we make this whole thing a plot by Gorilla Grodd... infameous mad scientist supervillan, and noted ape himself. If Grodd wanted to attack Superman, mutating a chimpanzee to grow to gargantuean size and giving him kryptonite lazers for eyes is EXACTLY how he'd do it... and it's all within his means.

And of course, we don't need to retell Titano's story over and over. We can tell it once, and be satisfied. We decided to let him stay gigantic and give him his own jungle island to rule because why WOULDN'T we do that?